by Julianne Lee
More stairs along the east side of the building descended to something that appeared to be a wooden platform where a huge wooden crane arm reached out over the side of the cliff. Beside it, Alex recognized the same sort of mechanism that lifted heavy castle gates, a rope dangled from the end of the hoist, and Alex looked down to find a leather sling hung from it. The barbican below was coming alive with the cattle, horses, sheep, and goats from the ships. Behind them on the land side, a narrow track descended along the side wall of the keep to a bailey beyond, a killing ground beneath arrow loops and oil sluices in the battlement above. Outside the gates, the countryside appeared deserted. Though the island was small, it was still large enough they’d need their horses.
Alex shoved on the hoist arm to see if it was solid. It swung nicely on a well-oiled pivot. He smacked the joints and found them tight, the wood not badly weathered. Then he climbed onto the arm and walked to the end. No give. He bounced, and the wood held as steady as rock. Last time he’d weighed himself he’d come in at one-eighty-two, and in his armor he figured he was over two hundred pounds, but his weight didn’t even begin to bend the hoist. It might handle a large animal, and the sling suggested it had in the past. He would find out soon, for they needed their horses.
He turned to his men and hopped from the hoist arm. “All right, let’s get some horses up here first.” He pointed to Lindsay. “Go down and ready five of them. Be sure to blindfold them before putting the sling on.” He turned to the remaining four men. “The rest of us will turn this hoist.” He saw no pulley at the end of the crane, only an iron bar over which the rope was draped; this wasn’t going to be an easy task.
Over the course of the afternoon they hauled five horses, then a load containing tack and armor, up and over the face of the castle keep. It was a monstrously difficult task, for though the hoist was of solid construction it was badly designed and the rope was a disaster waiting to happen. The men sweated and strained, and Alex kept a sharp eye on the rope as it stretched and twisted under the weight. Once the horses were lifted to the platform then led to the bailey, Alex ordered no more use of the hoist until the rope could be replaced. He counted himself lucky the thing hadn’t let go today with a valuable animal hung from it.
Squires presented themselves in the bailey to saddle their masters’ horses, a small beginning of activity in this empty, rugged place. The area outside the Great Hall was a maze of outcroppings of rock, and buildings of stone and wood. Situated between two rises in the cliffs, the castle was nestled and carved into the granite like the cliff dwellings of the Anasazi Indians. The layout was asymmetrical, the curtain walls following the peaks of the narrow, precipitous rock all the way to the flat ground of a glen beyond. There two curtains spanned the ravine, guarded by two ugly, square towers.
Once Alex and four of his knights were mounted in full armor, with surcoats and flying his new banner, they sallied out of the bailey, along the narrow outer bailey between curtain walls, then out the landside portcullis in the outer curtain, and finally onto the island. Pasture surrounded the castle for a couple of hundred yards or so, then gave way to thick forest covering rolling hills. Alex was relieved to find a cluster of low, peat houses near the forest edge, for that meant some centralization of the population. He wouldn’t have to ride all over the island to find someone who could give him information and act as liaison between himself and his vassals.
Vassals. He was still having trouble getting used to that idea.
The five cantered toward the huddled houses that passed for a village, and as they approached, people came from their homes to see. Alex adjusted the plaid thrown across his shoulder and slowed his mount to a walk. The villagers were dressed exactly like the MacNeils on Barra, in tunics, shirts, and plaids and very little else. Being summer, none of the men wore trews and many of the smaller children were entirely naked.
Women and children hung hack, letting the men form a line between them and the strangers. Alex reined in his mount and spoke first.
“The English have been vanquished in Lothian.” His banner with the bald eagle waved gently in the early August breeze.
He’d expected a reaction, but didn’t get it until one of the men turned and repeated his words in Gaelic. Then came the bright smiles and cheerful chatter, the gist barely comprehensible to Alex. He could see he would need to do some more studying up on the language if he was going to accomplish much here. Now he addressed the man who apparently knew English, but loudly enough for everyone to hear his voice and the tone it carried.
“I’m the new master of Eilean Aonarach. I’ve come to claim this island and its castle as my award from King Robert.”
Instead of translating, the man asked, “And what might be the new master’s name?”
“Sir Alexander an Dubhar MacNeil, Knight Banneret and royal vassal to His Majesty, King Robert of Scotland.”
One of the women exclaimed, ‘A ‘mol Dia.” She sounded thrilled. “MacNeil!” The other women began to chatter, and Alex gathered they were debating whether they would be displaced by Barra MacNeils. The English-speaker silenced them.
He explained to Alex, “She is your kinswoman, and comes from Barra.” Then he hesitated before continuing. “An Dubhar, you say?”
“That’s what they call me.”
The man nodded slowly, then said, “Are there many kinsmen with you?”
Alex shook his head. ‘No. Only my knights. I don’t expect much to change around here.”
That brought a wide smile and an air of relief from the man. He translated to the villagers, and a ripple of that gladness moved through the gathering. Alex realized this was going far better than he might have hoped, had he given it much thought before now. He asked, “How many people live on this island?”
The man shrugged, and asked the question of the rest of the villagers. Nobody knew.
“Are there many more than are here now?”
The English speaker looked over the crowd and said, “I think, perhaps, there are as many more living elsewhere on the island as are here before us.”
Alex thought a moment. His mount, fidgeting under the excitement of the day and the new surroundings, shifted weight and pawed the ground. Alex calmed the horse with a word, then said, “All right. I need workers. Anyone who will come to help clean the castle and make it livable can join in a feast when the job is done. No work, no food. The sooner the place is habitable, the sooner we all can celebrate.” He threw a look over his shoulder at the early evening sun slanting to the west, and said, “In the morning, come. Everybody come tomorrow, and spread the word to the rest.” He reined his horse around, but the English-speaker stepped forward.
“There is other work to be done tomorrow.”
Alex turned hack and nodded. “Aye. This isn’t an order. Nobody is required to come. Only those who wish to participate in the feast.”
The man blinked at him for a moment, then nodded and said, “Aye. Fair enough.”
Alex lowered his voice and leaned down, to speak more or less privately. “What is your name?”
“Donnchadh MacConnell. We’re mostly MacConnells here, and a few Bretons.”
“Who was your master before?”
Now the man’s hesitation gave Alex the willies, and suddenly he wasn’t too sure this was going to go so well. Donnchadh said, “We pay tribute to MacDonald. And MacLeod.”
This couldn’t be good. “Both of them?”
“Nae both at once, you understand. They take turns fighting over the island. ‘Tis been a feud now since the time of my grandfather.”
“Who built the castle?”
“The English king. The father of the sodomite.” Alex noted that, for a backwater island, the natives were remarkably aware of current affairs in the south. But from his time on Barra he knew the interisland fishermen’s gossip was an efficient information system to rival the Internet. Donnchadh continued. “And old Longshanks, he handed it over to a crony from the south, who fancied himself a lai
rd though he’d never seen a Gael in his life. Both MacLeod and MacDonald showed the usurper exactly how much he is not a Scot, and now his knights have fed the fish and the two true lairds are tending to other concerns for a time.”
Alex said slowly, “But they’ll be back.” That would explain why none of the important parts of the castle had been burned. The guys who had stormed the place together each expected to occupy it later.
“I’d wager my life on it. They’ll be wanting their tribute.” And Alex couldn’t tell by his neutral tone whether Donnchadh thought that was good or bad.
“I see, then.” The new master of the island straightened and called out over the crowd, Donnchadh translating. He took care his voice didn’t give away his concern. “Now hear this! You will no longer pay tribute to MacDonald, MacLeod, or any other laird who would lay claim to this island! I am the law here now, allied with MacNeil of Barra and Robert of Scotland! Any man here who fails to come to my keep and pledge loyalty to me within the fortnight will be evicted from his property and banished from this island!” He took a moment for that to sink in, then said, “Am I understood?”
His vassals gave a murmur of assent.
“Excellent. Come tomorrow, and we’ll get to know one another.”
A bald look of surprise at the change of tone landed on Donnchadh’s face, and a smile began on Alex’s. He was about to leave, when Sir Henry whispered to him, “The gate.”
Oh, yeah. “Donnchadh, one more thing. I need a blacksmith. Is there a blacksmith in the village?”
MacConnell turned to shout, “Alasdair Ruadh!” Alex wondered if there was any place in this country that wasn’t crawling with guys named Alasdair. A skinny, red-haired man pushed forward from the pack.
“Aye.”
“The barbican gate at the quay needs replacing immediately. Will you do the work?”
Donnchadh spoke to him, and Alasdair Ruadh nodded as he replied. Then Donnchadh said to Alex, “He’ll come to look at your gate in the morning.”
“I’ll need a translator—”
“I speak Gaelic.” Sir Henry spoke up and nudged his horse forward.
Alex peered at him for a moment, then said, “Very well.” To the villagers he said, “Good day to you all. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.” With that, Sir Alasdair turned his horse and kicked him to a walk. His men followed.
Sir Orrin called out to him, “That may not have been wise, sir, to be so informal with the lesser folk.”
Alex grunted and waved him forward. Once Orrin was riding beside him and out of earshot of the others, Alex told him calmly, “Thank you for your opinion, Orrin. It’s a calculated risk I think worth taking. And from here on out, I’ll ask you to remember your pledge to me and take care in what you say in front of the others. As you might well see, I can ill afford insubordination at this time. One more outburst will call for punishment. You’re on shaky ground, De Ros.”
Orrin thought that over for a minute, then said, “Aye, sir.” Then he fell back to ride in the ranks.
Alex’s mind turned with all the ramifications of what he’d just learned, sorting out where he stood and what he needed to look out for, but there were too many unknowns. Too much to do all at once. Suddenly he wondered whether Robert’s gift was the blessing he’d thought.
Chapter Sixteen
At the castle, a handful of squires had cleared space on the floor of the Great Hall for the men to lay out their pallets around the small fire that burned at one end of the long hearth. Eliot posted the watch, the men cooked and ate the rations, then, while they lounged around the fire in preparation for sleep, Alex took a candle to explore the keep.
Unlike the rambling castle on Barra, there wasn’t much to it. The impossibly narrow bailey was crowded with outbuildings for the kitchen, brewery, bake house, stable, barracks, and chapel, jutting this way and that and separated by narrow alleys or bulges of rock. So the keep probably held little more than the Great Hall and the laird’s living quarters. The spiral stairs upward from the Great Hall led only to the roof, and the spiral stairs from the anteroom led only to the barbican. The main door at the entry of the Hall led outside to the bailey, and a single door at the rear led to a small chamber lined with toilet seats. A many-holed garderobe. Strangely, the smell in here was a little less rank than elsewhere in the keep. Alex looked around the room and figured it was because nobody had died in here. Not recently, anyway.
Having scoped out the main level of the keep, Alex took his candle down a wide flight of stairs at the west end of the hall. Below, he found himself in an oblong room, with a stone ceiling curved like a Quonset hut, even more dark and cavelike than the Great Hall above. The oppressive dankness was unrelieved by openings of any sort, and there was only one small hearth on the long north side. Two doors opened from this room at the southeast corner. One of them led to a dead-end chamber equally close and dank. No windows. The second door led to a similar chamber, and beyond that anteroom was another small chamber in which he found an arrow loop. Finally, fresh air.
Alex leaned into the loop to breathe for a moment the salt air from outside, the stench of death in here was so thick. He’d become used to bad smells, and rotting corpses were nothing new to him anymore, but this was like a tomb, where such things dominated. It seeped into his skin and he could taste it in his mouth, an oily, sweet, gagging thing. The air seemed thick with the souls of the departed who hung about for jealousy of the living, and who might in their numbers and their misery even gather enough energy to reach out with cold, unseen—
“Alex.”
He jumped nearly out of his skin, and his chain mail rattled.
“Lindsay!” His heart flopped in his chest, and as he turned to her he pressed his fist against it to make it stop stuttering. “Dang.”
She stood in the doorway with a candle, chuckling. “There you are. You disappeared on me.”
“Sorry. I didn’t think you would be up to a lot of stair climbing yet.” It had been only a few weeks since the battle, and her wound was still bothering her enough to make her fold her left arm close to her side as if holding her ribcage together.
“I wanted to see the place.” She looked around. “It’s a bit of a dump, isn’t it?”
That was putting it mildly, but he didn’t want to dwell on it. Finally alone with her, he went to kiss her but stopped to stare when his candlelight fell upon a human skull atop a dark pile behind her. Alex had assumed the high stench in this room was strictly from body fluids left all over the floors after the recent fight, but here among the rags thrown on the floor in this chamber was a sunken-eyed head. Most of the flesh had rotted or been eaten from the face, and a mass of yellow hair stuck out like dried grass. Something grew from the dark mound on which it sat; a fungus of some kind, strange and shimmery in the dim light, and the corpse appeared to have become part of the wall behind it. Alex gawked, at once appalled and fascinated. He’d never seen such a thing before.
Lindsay turned to follow his gaze, looked down, and stepped back. “Oh, God!” She backed through the door to the other room, moaning in terror, “Oh, God, oh, my God...”
Alex didn’t know who the dead guy had been, but now he wished him to hell for scaring Lindsay. “Wait. Shhh.” He left the room with her and yanked the chamber door closed behind him. It closed on reluctant hinges and scraped over gunk on the floor. “Lindsay, calm down. It’s just a body they missed when they cleared the place out.” He put an arm around her and held her as close as he could without hurting her, and she was trembling. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll get them to take him out in the morning and give him a proper burial.”
She pressed her face against his plaid.
“Don’t be frightened. You’ve seen dead guys before.”
“Yes, but they’re starting to add up, and it’s getting to me. I don’t know if I can stand to see another mutilated person.” She looked at his face. “I don’t understand how you can take it anymore, either.”
He sh
rugged. “It’s not like I have a choice.”
She sighed and settled into his arms, holding him around the waist with her weak arm. He let her warmth and her living presence bolster him, for the corpse had rattled him, too. Then he forced his voice to a cheerful tone. “Hey, there’s one more chamber. Let’s see what’s behind door number three.”
“More rotting flesh, I imagine.”
“Dunno. Maybe not.” He took her hand and drew her along.
The third door led to a chamber much larger than any of the others. At one end the ceiling of mortared stones was curved, as were those in the other rooms directly below the Great Hall, but then the room widened and there the ceiling was wooden. Beams ridged it as they did in the Great Hall, and part of one wall was living rock that bulged slightly into the room. The hearth was deep in the wall opposite, large enough to spit half a deer. A door near the hearth opened to a private garderobe with two holes.
Alex slapped the rock wall. “Check this out. You couldn’t buy decor like this back home.”
Lindsay ran a hand across it, then they both noticed at the far end was a glazed window rather than an arrow loop. Small, but still larger than a loop.
“Look, glass.” Lindsay went to tap on it, as if doubting it could be real. The glass was terribly wavy and only a little more translucent than a frosted bathroom window, but there would be light through it even in winter for it faced south. When she opened it, fresh summer night air wafted in from the sea below. She set her candle among the many stones that made up the very deep, slanted ledge, and turned to survey the room. “Must be the lord’s chamber.”
“If it wasn’t, it is now.” He went to kiss her, and this time succeeded. He did it gently, so not to hurt her, and she breathed carefully. But also he kissed her gently because she was the only soothing thing left in his life. She was soft voice, bright smile, and yielding breasts when they weren’t all bound up out of his reach. Her mouth was sweet and welcoming, kissing him in return with all the enthusiasm he could hope for. It was moments like this he thought she really did love him the way he wished, and his heart ached that he might think it all the time.
